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By Alan Morinis “Improving the qualities of the soul” is one way to define Mussar. All of us have some inner qualities that could use improvement, and through Mussar the impatient person does become more patient, the miser learns to open his fist, the harsh parent becomes loving, the worry-wart learns trust. This focus on improving inner traits (middot in Hebrew) might lead you to think that the entire concern of Mussar is inward. Far from it. It is impossible to do Mussar and to experience its benefits by working on your self in isolation. Self-help books promise to help a person get what they want for themselves out of life or to find personal happiness independent of others, but those aren’t Mussar books. There is no place in a real spiritual life for selfish motives. Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, who founded the Mussar movement in the 19th century, said it like this: “Spirituality is higher than the material, but the material needs of another are an obligation of my spiritual life.” In other words, if you want to develop yourself spiritually, you have to get involved in satisfying the practical needs of other people. The Mussar masters describe the goal of spiritual life as developing personal inner “wholeness,” and they also insist that you can’t possibly reach that goal without being involved in helping others achieve physical and social well-being. The Mussar approach sees “life in here” as intimately related to “life out there.” “Wholeness” means becoming balanced and competent in every one of my inner traits, and so my wholeness requires that I become adept at loving-kindness, compassion, generosity, patience – traits that have no reality and cannot be developed in isolation. I can only cultivate a generous heart by having someone to whom I can give, just as compassion requires relating caringly to another person. It’s one thing to sit in solitary comfort and stir up feelings of loving-kindness for others in your heart, and quite another to live that trait in reality. You probably feel as I do that it is a positive virtue to help people in need, and you would join me in tut-tutting over media reports of bystanders who did not intervene. Those sentiments got put to the test recently when I was walking down the street and saw a disheveled-looking man hunched over in a doorway vomiting. Every instinct told me to walk on by. Now we’d see who I really am, not just who I think I ought to be. It was a challenge to rise to the occasion and put my values into action by stopping and asking him what help he needed. In fact, engagement with others is the best possible school we can find in which to cultivate traits. Rabbi Yosef Yozel Hurwitz, founder of the Novarodock school of Mussar, relates a story from the Talmud about Rav Preida, who had a student who needed every lesson taught to him 400 times before he would get it. One day, the student was distracted and after the 400th repetition, he still had not learned the lesson. All right, said Rav Preida, we’ll do it another 400 times. And at the end of the 800th review, not only did the student understand but a heavenly voice called out to offer Rav Preida a choice of reward – would he like 400 years added to his life, or would he prefer that he and his generation be admitted to the World-to-Come? Rav Preida chose the latter, and then the voice boomed, “Give him both.” Rav Preida was (obviously!) the paragon of patience. The Alter of Novarodock asks us to consider how Rav Preida might have developed that trait, and he concludes that he did so by consistently facing the test of his slow-learning student. And then the punch line: if you were setting yourself a course of spiritual practice, is it conceivable that you would come up with such a way to practice patience? No one would ever give himself or herself that level of test. Only real life delivers up the unimaginable situations that we actually need if we are to stretch and grow to the fullness of our potential. Rav Preida’s choice of reward reinforces the same message. The alternatives were to reward himself or his community (including himself). Again, he chose the well-being of others by opting for the latter. And what’s the punch line here? He got both. By choosing the well-being of the community, he was rewarded personally as well. That’s the point. Rabbi Hurwitz’s teacher, Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, shows us another way in which communal service and personal spiritual practice coincide. He is concerned not with the cultivation of specific middot that we need in order to be whole, as we’ve been considering, but rather with our need to get a firm grip on the desires that course through our hearts and divert our lives from the good. He wrote:
There are many stories of how Rabbi Salanter gave himself to his community. When the elders in a town were slow to fix the roof of the local poor-house, Rabbi Salanter went and slept among the poor there, and it didn’t take many nights before the funds for the repair appeared. Such is the consciousness of a student of Mussar. Engagement with others is a powerful way to foster a good heart within us while at the same time honoring the interpersonal responsibilities that make for peace and justice in the world. What comes into clear focus is that self-centeredness is the primary barrier to both personal spiritual fulfillment and peaceful relations with others. And isolating ourselves to work on our own spiritual lives is not how we will overcome self-centeredness. This is a principle we have built into all the programs of The Mussar Institute. It defines our view of spirituality and the journey of spiritual ascent. |
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